Simone Mousset, Empire of a Faun Imaginary

Simone Mousset, Empire of a Faun Imaginary, The Place, February 28, 2023

If you take each word of the title and consider what it represents — its lines of influence and significance — and then multiply each by the other two and then by time and space, you get a surreal blend of history, myth, and evolution that forms the mere starting point of Simone Mousset’s latest work, Empire of a Faun Imaginary. Clearly no linear framework can accommodate such a vast canvas, so Mousset has created with her performers and collaborators a three-dimensional fable with no beginning and no end, revealed within the theatrical convention of the rising and the extinguishing of the lights. 

Four lascivious fauns (Tasha Hess-Neustadt, Lewys Holt, Eevi Kinnunen and Hannah Parsons) with bold eye makeup and costumed (for the women) in Birte Meier’s almost invisible hirsuit tights, appear displaced but poised in a neat diagonal in Lydia Sonderegger’s parched landscape with faded terra-cotta-coloured sculptural rocks. Under Seth Rook Williams’ lighting we see an almost flat plane like a painting, with the accented colours of Sonderegger’s costumes bringing the dancers into relief. There is a clear reference to the flat perspective and turned-in shape of Nijinsky’s faun but no sooner are we allowed to take this in than the dancers dissolve it into animalistic expressions of feral solitude in which their vocal agility conveys the uncanny disparity between human and animal. Jamie McCarthy is credited with the ‘voice work and vocal composition’ whose effect develops from the initially comic — especially with an almost camp interpretation of faunic movement — to the disturbingly visceral as Alberto Ruiz Soler’s soundscape blows in over the action like a weather front. 

The action is slow enough that we can follow where Mousset takes us but she never goes where we expect; she is constantly destabilising us with her wry yet compassionate humour that helps us to grasp the enormity of her proposal. As the program note states, ‘Yearning for transformation and new futures, Empire of a Faun Imaginary is a melancholic world in search of the miraculous, that asks: How can we go on, and how can we dream again?’. The scale of time she employs is so vast that it diffuses any direction to the action; it is as if Mousset is giving theatrical life to a consciousness that is bubbling up from deep within her life and searching to make sense of the world and its many mysteries, especially death. The four fauns, who are oblivious to any time span but the present, at first follow their instincts as they map out their proscribed space with casual and sometimes hilarious abandon — until one of them dies. Fear and grief transform the atmosphere. The voices of the survivors become the physical and psychological extensions of their bodies; Parsons, in particular, extends the range of emotion to startling levels in her vocal pyrotechnics. And then Mousset changes tack with delicious irony to a parental bedtime conversation projected on to two mute rocks (whose immutability is later challenged), followed by the entrance of a mangey mammoth (created by Sophie Ruth Donaldson and Emilie Mathieu) whose longevity signals life’s overarching continuity and the expedience of reincarnation. Once again, Mousset steers a course through hazardous spiritual terrain, but even if we can’t ignore the ineffable sense of existential dis-ease that pervades Empire of a Faun Imaginary, its pessimism is mitigated by Mousset’s surreal humour and her unfettered embrace of life’s complexities that suggests a way through. 

Crafting a compact theatrical work from such profound material requires a team in whom the artist can collaborate with complete trust. Apart from those already been mentioned above — and there is welcome continuity in that some have worked with Mousset on previous projects — Neil Callaghan is credited as ‘artistic companion’, Macon Holt as cultural theory consultant, Vasanthi Argouin as producer and in Lou Cope as dramaturg Mousset has evidently found a sympathetic spirit capable of disentangling threads and allowing them to find their place and significance in the finished schema.  

Mousset is currently a Work Place Artist at The Place, which helps to sustain a current group of eleven artists and to ‘provide conditions for their work to grow and flourish over a five-year period.’ She has written on the Work Place site that ‘making things up and dancing and moving is a way for me to try and save myself, and potentially others, from a sense of general hopelessness.’ With this welcome first UK performance of Empire of a Faun Imaginary, she has also raised dance to a level of discourse that not only saves but enriches. 

Igor and Moreno: Idiot-Syncrasy at The Place

Igor and Moreno, Idiot-Syncrasy, The Place, October 9

Moreno Solinas and Igor Urzelai in Idiot-Syncrasy (photo: Alicia Clarke)

The packed house for this one night reprise of Idiot-Syncrasy at The Place (who originally commissioned it) and the fervour with which it was received is an indication of its revered status. Created in 2015, Idiot-Syncrasy is the triumph of an idea (changing the world) over form (jumping), and yet the form is so completely seeped in the idea that it becomes its rich evocation. It’s also hard to imagine anyone other than its choreographers, Igor Urzelai and Moreno Solinas, performing this work as quite independently of their stage presence its geography, sentiment and generosity are rooted in their biographies. Urzelai is from San Sebastian in the Basque Country and Solinas is from Sardinia, both autonomous regions with a defiant sense of cultural and political identity. At the beginning of Idiot-Syncrasy Urzelai and Solinas stand side by side in silence on Kaspersophie’s expansive white stage dressed in jeans, windjackets and sneakers, communicating a sense of self-assurance and composure as they slowly and deliberately scope the audience. And then, almost imperceptibly they begin to sing a cappella extracts of Procurade e moderare, a nineteenth century Sardinian revolutionary song — recently adopted as the Sardinian national anthem — with a text by Francesco Ignazio Mannu aimed at the ruling House of Savoy. At first we hear only the fine harmonies of the two voices, but the spirit of the song is enshrined in it and as the voices gain strength and Urzelai and Solinas add a heel-bouncing emphasis it transforms into a revolutionary march with all its pride and defiance.

This is where idea and form first meet; the bounce becomes a jump and the jump becomes the iteration of a single choreographic idiom — somewhere between a hop and a jump — with multiple variations. The rhythmic constancy of the idiom becomes an affirmation of resilience while its patterns and incidents are occasions for personal narratives and humour. When the two continue jumping as they strip off their outer layers Urzelai is meticulous in the way he piles his clothing while Solinas discards his like a rebellious child. There are seemingly inconsequential exits that presage more purposeful re-entrances with a change of coloured t-shirts, for example, or a bounding delivery of a generous shot of heart-warming Patxaran to the entire audience. Throughout Idiot-Syncrasy the personal and the political cavort and overlap as if Urzelai and Solinas are reminding us that even the most mundane social actions have cumulative consequences.

It took some decades after Mannu’s Procurade e moderare before the Savoyards left Sardinia, and there is a long section of Idiot-Syncrasy that borrows from the folk traditions of Sardinia and the Basque Country accompanied by Alberto Ruiz Soler’s deep, rumbling drone that leaves behind the more personable interventions of the two performers and focuses, through discursive patterns of jumping, skating and turning, on the effort and grind of generations in both regions to achieve and maintain their goal of political autonomy. The realm of the metaphorical allows time for the audience to feel that effort and to participate in it without any overt indications of politicization or propaganda. This is the beauty of dance as a medium because the message is embodied rather than rhetorical and in adopting a vocabulary that is so guileless Urzelai and Solinas imbue what at first appears naive with the power of an epic history of camaraderie, generosity, and conviction as the four bottles of Patxaran continue to make their autonomous rounds of the audience.

Gradually Seth Rook Williams’ lighting indicates the diminishing of the epic scale as we return once again to the personal, to the individual orbits of these two charismatic idealists and their relationship to one other. The jumping calms to turning patterns and even a phrase of ballroom, with the two drawing closer until Solinas lifts Urzelai on to his back and they begin to sing a cappella again, not nationalist hymns but a brief medley of love songs in Italian, Spanish and Euskara. Both men are exhausted but continue to turn slowly, and we can hear in their vocal traces the emotion and determination of the journey they have made and will continue to make.